Dreamforce1?

Dreamforce1?

So unless you’ve been living under a rock for a couple of weeks, you will have heard about Salesforce1, a new mobile interface to Salesforce built using its recently announced Aura UI technology. I’m personally now left wondering if the mega conference should have been branded the whole event Dreamforce1? The event not only eclipsed all expectations from previous events, it reset the bar, the world’s largest software conference! As usual, they had to close a street to make it work, I took this rather bizarre photo on the first morning…
Certainly at FinancialForce.com, we could barely hold our excitement any longer for sure around Salesforce1. Having been one of only a handful of ISV partners to be involved in the early adopters program, we were very proud to be part of the launch, not only presenting in the DevZone about it (see playlist below), but also being one of only a few companies to make a Salesforce1 extension available to our customers live at the event, further supporting our back office story, in the form of ‘FinancialForce 360° Back Office‘.
As Salesforce explained at the event, there is much more to come from Salesforce1 and this is just the beginning to creating a unique device agnostic user interface to its platform and those that build on it.
Another huge aspect of the event, which is particular interest to me is the reality of connected devices, or the ‘Internet of Things‘ as was the phrase at the event. You could not help but notice the Tesla when entering the event, with its huge fully digitised dashboard and centre console. I was also proud to be part of the Connected Devices Lab with Salesforce, presenting a hobby project of mine connecting Lego robots to the Salesforce cloud via Salesforce1.
Between both Salesforce1 and the Internet of Things themes, sits one overriding need, API’s, Application Programming Interfaces. The unsung heroes of what sits behind our mobile apps, cloud integrations and how cars (see unofficial Tesla REST API!), jet engines and robots can now work with us in ways we had not ever imagined. I bumped into a guy who had a device for fitness centres to give out to its customers to wear and it aggregates the data into Salesforce to help track progress. When you think about FinancialForce products and API’s and things such project resources tracked and managed within our Professional Services product, they all of sudden start to have more of personality than they did before!
Finally I want to call out the FinancialForce.com R&D team, who have put in a huge amount of effort into sessions and general presence at the event. It was great to see so many of our customers in our sessions and enjoying our presence at the event. If you missed any of our sessions, we have created a YouTube play list listing our sessions, currently over three and half hours of Dreamforce session goodness to enjoy!